Nicholas Alexander Chavez is still holding his head high amid the inevitable ebbs and flows of a career in the turbulent entertainment industry.
A month after the premiere of Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s I Know What You Did Last Summer sequel — which confirmed rumors that Chavez and actress Lola Tung would not appear despite shooting scenes for the film — the rising star is opening up about the disappointing turn of events.
“I mean, Jennifer is a good friend. She’s really, really cool people, and, you know, me and Lola had a really, really good time,” Chavez told Us Weekly on Thursday. “All I could think about was my time that I spent in Australia, which was hanging out with kangaroos, going on hot air balloon adventures over the plains at sunrise, going cherry picking with my girlfriend.”
Chavez said those positive production experiences represent “all I remember when I think about that movie.”
Brook Rushton/Sony
Chavez and Tung’s casting was announced in November alongside One Tree Hill star Austin Nichols and model Gabbriette. But while Nichols and Gabbriette went on to appear in the film, which bowed in theaters on July 18, Chavez and Tung did not.
“In every movie, it’s best laid plans, and then you edit the movie and you put it together and you go, ‘I love this in a vacuum. This is a fantastic scene. But it doesn’t fit in the movie,'” Kaytin Robinson told PEOPLE at the film’s Los Angeles premiere on July 14. “It was just one of those situations where it had nothing to do with Lola and Nicholas — they are both so fantastic. I really would love to work with them again. I loved working with them. They did a fabulous job.”
But Kaytin Robinson explained that “in the larger tapestry of the film, it just didn’t fit.”
I Know What You Did Last Summer is a direct sequel to 1998’s I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, itself a sequel to the original 1997 slasher, but the new movie is the fourth in the franchise, after 2006’s direct-to-video threequel I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer.
Kaytin Robinson’s new vision reteams two of the film’s original stars, Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr., with rising Hollywood talent, including Outer Banks standout Madelyn Cline, The Little Mermaid‘s Jonah Hauer-King, and Generation alum Chase Sui Wonders.
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The new film’s intro retreads the iconic opening sequence of the 1997 original, but Kaytin Robinson revealed that it was Chavez and Tung’s unused footage that was meant to open the film.
Kaytin Robinson didn’t reveal what those scenes might have entailed, and Chavez declined to divulge the scenes’ plot, as well, remarking, “That’s left to other people!”
Miles Crist/Netflix
Chavez recently faced another disappointment regarding a series he did appear in: Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story. Of the core four players on the Ryan Murphy-produced series — Chavez, Cooper Koch, Javier Bardem, and Chloë Sevigny — Chavez was the only actor not to receive a 2025 Emmy nomination.
Koch told The Hollywood Reporter he was “devastated” that Chavez and Ari Graynor were overlooked for noms after the list was released, saying, “I think both of them really deserved to be on there, so I’m super bummed that they didn’t get nominated.”
On potentially returning to the IKWYDLS universe, Chavez remains open to the possibilities.
“You know, ask me tomorrow, I’ll have a million different answers for you,” he told Us Weekly. “The only thing that matters at this point in my career is just doing good material with people who I love and people who I believe in and who believe in me.”
